Friday, September 08, 2006

Outside Security

I'm sitting in Bloemfontein Airport (Vodacom, not WiFi) chatting on ICQ, and the whole thing with Heathrow Airport has come up again. And it occurred to me, I had better write. Because they will say "nobody could have seen this coming."

This, of course, is the inevitability that some terrorist somewhere will notice that the best targets today are in those heaving seas of tired, parched and irritable seas of humanity crowded immediately outside security.

I mean, look at Heathrow. You have the equivalent of a dozen 747 flights crammed in a tiny room there, and there is utterly nothing stopping a terrorist from walking in there and taking out the whole building.

Meanwhile, we are supposed to believe that the cause of this line-up - preventing people from bringing paper-clips and sealed bottles of water onto flights - is making us safer. It is not, of course. And worse, it is making busy airports - like Heathrow - much more dangerous.

But we are supposed to trust these people who are managing our security for us.

It is hard, very hard, to think of our national security forces as the enemy. Because they were set up, by us, to protect us.

But they have been captured by unscrupulous politicians who are managing a climate of fear in order to justify their illegal and unprovoked wars of empire. And as a result, it is us - and not the terrorists - that have become the targets. Of our own security.

When the inevitable happens, there will be raised fists, angry shouts of anguish, and condemnations of the bombers. And nary a word about how it was our own security that led us into the corral to be slaughtered like sheep, our own security that set up a situation that made a devastating attack not merely easy to predict, but inevitable.

I am not a specialist in security and defense and terrorism. And I can see this coming a mile away. So, therefore, must our security. Yet they continue to create this unsafe situation. We must only conclude that they are doing it deliberately.

Anyhow - avoid Heathrow and the other large airports, at least outside security. Drive to a smaller airport and start your flight from a safer departure airport. And remember - you read it here, and it was easy to predict.